Digital Library Building Blocks

The California Digital Library provides software, best practices, and other tools to facilitate digital library operations.

Best Practices and Standards

• Online Archive of California (OAC) best practice guidelines:
  • For encoded archival description, version 2.0: February 2005 [HTML] [PDF]
  • For digital objects, version 1.1: January 2004 [HTML]
  
  
• CDL digital object standard:


• Version 1.0: May 18, 2001 [PDF]
• Version 2.0 (forthcoming in 2005) [HTML]



• CDL digital image format standards: July 9, 2001 [PDF]
• CDL best practices for image capture, version 1.0: February 2001 [PDF]
• CDL TEI encoding guidelines (forthcoming in 2005)
• Minimal level OAC MARC records for CDL, Version 1.1: January 2004 [HTML]
• Standards for minimal level MARC bibliographic records for University of California Libraries: January 1, 2003 [DOC]
• Standards for UC Union catalog input records: April 22, 2003 [RTF]
• Archival Resource Key (ARK): naming scheme for persistent access to digital objects. [HTML]

Submissions

• CDL/UC libraries digital assets agreement: September 24, 2003 [PDF]
• CDL/UC libraries digital assets submission inventory: September 24, 2003 [RTF]

Software and Services

• Submitting and editing finding aids: voroEAD allows OAC contributing members to submit, preview, store, and publish EAD encoding finding aids in the OAC.
• UC-eLinks OpenURL resolution: The CDL allows UC campus libraries to customize and localize the SFX OpenURL resolution service, UC-eLinks. For detailed operational information about campus instances of UC-eLinks, go to the UC-eLinks Campus Liaisons page.
• The CDL METS Repository: Provides information about the CDL's digital object repository, including:
  • Querying the METS Repository
  • Interface Customization Tools
  • OAI Data Service
• Markup data dictionary: Encoding strategy for the data dictionary used for processing of all U.S. census studies.

Guidelines

• Suggestions for linking into CDL web-based services: Provides guidelines for how to link into CDL web sites.
• CDL user interface principles: Used by the CDL when evaluating a vendor interface, these principles also apply to any digital library search interface.

References

• Glossary: Includes definitions for CDL and UC terms, crawling and harvesting, digital objects, metasearching, and more.